Re: Editing and formatting characters

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com> writes:

> > In the cases where these features were missing I always ended up seeing
> > the formating characters; eg: no formatting buttons implied show formating
> > info.
> 
> Never set a worprocessor to "fullscreen" ?
> The buttons can not be there; but I agree that there should be some way
> to activate/deactivate it (a global key combinaison or something like that)

In the latest version of GTK+, both GtkEntry and GtkTextView have
right click menus for switching input method. I expect to
extend the menus to have options for inserting formatting
characters and turning on and off display of invisible
characters. 

Now, this isn't always the right mechanism for presenting the
options to a user, but is meant to be a common-denominator 
fallback mechanism that will be available everywhere.

> > With out "formatting buttons" or "show invisible characters", how will the
> > user be able to understand and control these invisible characters?
 
> The idea is to make it good enough that it could be used without
> understanding it.

Yep, that's the goal, though my expectation is that it is always
going to seem a bit funny - but then again, it only affects a
very small proportion of texts and users.

Regards,
                                        Owen